Arcania - Interview @ Gry.o2.pl

September 28th, 2008, 07:02

Gry speaks to Spellbound's community manager EDL about Arcania: A Gothic Tale, strangely suggesting they haven't chosen an engine yet. I suspect they really mean they are holding back the announcement but here's the text:

Klecha (Gry.o2.pl): What sort of game engine features will Gothic 4: Arcania support?

Dietrich Limper (Spellbound): Whatever game engine we finally announce to use for Gothic 4 - we have created most of the really outstanding effects internally and they do work on top of any engine we could use. (Spellbound is choosing from: Vision-Engine, Unreal Engine and Gamebryo Engine) In a Gothic like game, you need to have very convincing lighting and shadowing techniques and you can probably see it from some of the shots released that they are in place already. More stuff will be revealed in the next months to come.

As somebody who knows nothing about game development I would suspect the engine question is decided at the latest during pre-production. The part of the budget allocated to the engine probably before the project gets the green light.
Well, they can say whatever they want. Spellbound has used Vision before. Vision supports multiple platforms and itīs probably cheaper than the other two engines mentioned. It would be the obvious choice.

Iīve read an interesting rumor some time ago. Of course totally unconfirmed:
Arcania will be completely developed, except bugfixing (and balancing, I guess), in March 2009. Then it will be released for Christmas.